Don't Run From Anything, Run Towards Everything

Dropping Mountains

The majority of work I’ve done since mid-November has gotten me nowhere, will never see a printed page. But that isn’t to say the bulk of this has not helped me grow as a writer. 50-some odd pages I wrote for the novel, and not one will be used. I wrote five chapters and decided to scrap it all, to rework the entire story-line.

What did I learn from all this? How to write. How to sit down and write through for twelve hours. How to sit down and focus and hear or see nothing else but the words of the Universe that sits in my head. I learned how to find a flow, how to write consistently in a single voice, with a single style, with a certain groooove. (Perhaps I’ll post some excerpts.) I wrote five god-damn chapters and scrapped them all. Sometimes you must dig halfway through the mountain, watch the whole fucking thing collapse, and realize it’s much simpler to climb over the rubble. It’s annoying, but you realize that what you’re doing is all the better for it, that without the disaster failure would have been much more tangible.

I did finish a couple of short stories though, I’ll post them after this. One is called “Citizen Whores” and the other is “StreetWalks” and I’ve just remembered about “Reasons”.

“Citizen Whores” is politically charged, which is where I find lots of energy. It’s a trip though, and I kind of saw it as a graphic novel in my head first, with lots of attention to detail, the settings and appearances of the characters. I would like to continue to write politically charged stories, because, again, this is where I find a great deal of my energy, in the simple yet sublime idea that the purpose of being human is the power of choice. I’ve lined up a few story-lines about small government and libertarian policies, but the roadblock I’ve driven up to is my own desire to write a realist, minimalist short story, something that drives a poignant point but with such subtlety as that you’d never expect it. With such themes as those I plan to write, it’s hard to script a simple, realist story — the ideas are too complex. How do you subtly convey the idea of states’ rights in a simple, realistic dialogue? I’ll give it whack I suppose.